Toshiba Satellite L850 complet review

Toshiba Satellite L850

 

Design

Out of the box, this looks like a traditional laptop, with usual Toshiba over done looks and design. This may not be the slimmest of all but it is not the thickest either.

The Toshiba Satellite L850’s lid has the brushed metal finish. The Toshiba logo on the lid, and looks little too big and seems unnessary. At the moment, it just looks like a desperate attempt to make everyone see the brand name.

This seems happy change after all the ultra books. On the left side are the power port and a USB 2.0 as well as the optical drive. On the other side are two USB 3.0 ports, HDMI out and Ethernet port, along with a generous cooling vent with all this Toshiba seems more ready for the future. The area on the left side around the ports is smooth, which  is a very bad move because it’ll inevitably get scratched very badly. The memory card slot is on the front near side, on the slightly inward curved spine.

The keyboard is well spaced out, helped by the margins offered by the 15.6-inch display. There is a dedicated number pad as well. Call us old fashioned, but we like that to be centre aligned, because that is just how the hand naturally positions itself on the keypad. The dual-tone black and grey gel well, without the shiny finish that makes laptops maintenance hungry. The touchpad has a generous amount of real estate, and it looks like it has a textured finish, but that is actually just an imprint.

The clean look around the keypad is mostly due to the complete non-existence of any shortcut / quick access keys. It is just the power button which is sharing the space with the speaker, and that is it! We don’t mind that though, since the Fn keys do double up as shortcut keys for various settings.

It is surprising that while the Satellite L850 is lighter at 2.3kgs than the Acer Aspire that tips the scales at 2.6kgs, the latter feels lighter to pick up and carry around. The L850 is built very well though, and the brushed metal finish intertwined with the matte black along the entire package means it should appeal to almost everyone, and looks shouldn’t be an issue at all.

Features

Powered by Intel Core i7-3610QM quad-core processor powers the L850, clocked at 2.3GHz, with Turbo Boost mode taking it to 3.3GHz and no stoping there, with 8GB of RAM it blows many of its competitors.

Toshiba has the ATI Radeon 7670M chip with 2GB dedicated graphics memory.

The large 15.6-inch display on the Satellite L850 is amazing. The brightness levels are quite high, and tend to act as an antidote for the slightly reflective nature of the display. It will be very comfortable for both office users as well as for multimedia viewing.

Toshiba have goes out to the party, and offered a 750GB hard drive with the L850. But do remember, both are traditional hard drives, and not solid-state drives.

Performance

There is a strong quad-core processor paired with 8GB of RAM, the Satellite L850 scores an impressive 9254 in the PC Mark Vantage test. The clear advantage of the Core i7 processor shows up in this test.

The above observation is verified by the Cinebench CPU score comparison – 6.29 for the Satellite L850 for the Core i7-3610QM. The V3’s Core i5-2450M scored 2.7 clearly showing up the gulf between these two generations of processors.

We had mentioned about the different camps these two laptops sit in, with regards to graphics. Just to refresh your memory, the Acer has the Nvidia GeForce GT630M while the Satellite L850 has the ATI Radeon 7670M. Well, ATI fans will not like how the graphics benchmarks read! Acer’s Nvidia chip scored 9944 in the 3D Mark 06 test, while the Toshiba’s ATI card was slightly behind with 9123. For 3D Mark 11 in Entry Mode, the Satellite L850 scores 1982 while the Aspire V3 scores 2085 in the same mode. Similar story in Performance Mode, with the Satellite L850 scores 1191 while the Aspire V3 scored 1238. But, good news awaits the ATI fans. In the Extreme taxing mode on the same benchmark, the Satellite L850 scores 391 while the Acer scores 379.

Battery life disappoints like no other Satellite L850. In any case what, the battery will not last more than 90 minutes at full taxing mode.